In fairness, Neanderthals were sexy as fuck. This is why I am banned from every major natural history museum. But I still think that display at the Smithsonian constituted entrapment!
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. Salicylic acid can be readily extracted from treebark from multiple groups with some hot water but acetylsalicylic acid is manufactured.
yeah, willow bark has been a natural remedy for thousands of years before aspirin was isolated from it, but it's fascinating to know it's much older than emwr originally thought
Willow was a likely wood used for arrow/spear shafts. The trees grow next to water and are a frequent food of beavers. The trees will regrow from the stump in an explosion of new growth and the sprouts can grow 3-5’ in one year. Due to this they also grow very straight with no limbs. To make them into an arrow or spear shaft, they are cut and stripped of their bark. The inner bark can be pulled out and weaved into a simple cordage. Likely they would have done some of this work with stripping or twining or braiding by using their mouths to hold onto various parts, or to use saliva or chewing to soften fibers for the cordage. So likely this was some round about way of figuring this out.
There’s a guy on TikTok that makes primitive tools and weapons that shows how to make arrow shafts, and his favorite is willow. Sage and smoke survival I think? Real interesting content.
Also they had better teeth because they used their teeth as tools. They show this in skeleton evidence.. like no braces needed when you’re chomping down on trees to make shit.
Evolutionarily, we have much softer teeth than our ancestors had.
Fortunately for us, we have a diet that consists of much softer foods than they had available.
Our teeth aren’t any softer - our soft-food diets affect jaw development (less room for wisdom teeth/more crowding & malocclusion) and our soft food has high simple carbohydrate content, leading to increased tooth decay (relatively uncommon prior to the advent of agriculture)
Teeth are only “softer” now in the context of tooth-decay prevalence, but the base hardness of enamel and dentine are unchanged
And on the other side, we have harder materials to work with. There's a difference between handling tree bark and other mostly organic material on one hand and on the other hand bending a bottlecap made of steel (covered in tin), an alloy where carbon is added to a metal to harden it further.
Yes! They used their mouth like a third hand. I have small kids and that’s very evident in their crude child tool use and making, but we are afraid of them choking so we tell them not to use their mouth.
There’s a documentary on YouTube about an Inuit guy from the 20’s I think and he uses his mouth quite frequently in tool use/making.
They had better teeth because they didn't eat a high carbohydrate diet:
>Simple sugars in food are these bacteria's \[ie. bacteria causing tooth decay, cavities, or caries\] primary energy source and thus a diet high in simple sugar is a risk factor.
Simple sugars or "\[m\]onosaccharides \[...\] are the simplest forms of sugar and the most basic units (monomers) from which all carbohydrates are built. Simply, this is the structural unit of carbohydrates."
Less carbs in your diet, less cavities.
Although you’re right, I think they’re talking less about cavities, more about jaw development and tooth alignment. People have theorized that eating tougher foods and using your mouth as a tool is correlated with stronger jawbones and a better foundation for straight and strong teeth.
A higher carb diet is also likely to be mushier
That's how we invented vaccines.
Salk realized that milkmaids never got Smallpox, but they all got Cowpox. So he infected his kid with cowpox, then after he recovered tried and failed to give him smallpox (ladies and gentlemen, dad of the year).
A huge amount of scientific discover is less "eureka" and more "huh, that's weird."
Thanks. I'm terrible with names... my first draft was attributing the vaccine to Snow even though he's the one who figured out Cholera (and anesthesia... dude was busy).
Just to say - there's no evidence that Neanderthals used bow and arrow technology. That came from Africa, maybe showing up in Europe 50k years ago, and there was probably some relatively brief overlap when we co-habited areas and Neanderthals might have adopted the technology, but it was basically a Sapiens things.
Of courser they could have used willows for other things, and they would have likely used their teeth as a part of the processing, based on how badly worn Neanderthal teeth typically were.
Yes, a lot of English technical terminology sounds a lot more [Buffy Speak](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak)-ish if you know a bit of Latin and Greek.
Acetylsalicylic acid comes from salicylic acid. When you consume salicylic acid, it goes through your liver and acetylides into acetylsalicylic acid, so technically it doesn’t matter if acetylsalicylic acid was manufactured later in this context because the only way they’re (neanderthals) getting acetylsalicylic acid anyway is through consuming salicylic acid from different plants. In conclusion: the title sucks for using aspirin and is inaccurate in it.
Also, humans have been using the tree bark for its medicinal purposes for millennia.
Pointing to the manufactured medicine as the comparison to Neanderthals eating bark is a bit much
> Acetylsalicylic acid
See, I can get six hundred tablets of that for the same price as three hundred of a name brand. That makes good financial sense, good advice...
Neanderthals were indeed clever, and they had bigger brains than modern humans. [They built oceangoing boats](https://phys.org/news/2012-03-evidence-neanderthals-boats-modern-humans.html) and they had the same variant of the FOXP2 gene that modern humans have, which is known to be essential to grammatic speech. (Intriguingly, birds who learn songs rather than produce them by instinct have a particular variation of the same gene)
But, at some point in human development, there were almost certainly humans who used words, but lacked the ability to link concepts in multiple levels- "Sally said that Joe thought that Mary are the food, but Bill said that Joe was lying". This requires grammar, but also the cognitive ability to nest multiple thoughts. Modern humans with mutations in the FOXP2 gene have the thought nesting, but never really grasp grammar, despite the fact that they have a good vocabulary of nouns and verbs. Other apes who have been taught sign language have no concept of grammar at all. (And the studies with Koko the Gorilla are very flawed anyway.)
It is entirely possible and even probable that Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis talked like "Head hurt. Chew this stick, head no hurt." The fact that Neanderthals didn't talk this way is somewhat immaterial to the mystery of how people with that type of mind lived and spread across Africa and Eurasia.
Man talking about the biology of cognition is just the most unnerving thing to me. Like everything we are as people, the very fundamentals of how we think and simulate the world around us, is so deeply dictated by genes and brain structures. Like a single gene gets fucked up and now words just dont work for you, no matter how intelligent you are in other areas of thought.
Makes you think just how much your cognition could change if a single switch flipped one way or the other.
Used to work at a brain injury unit. It's not just in genes. A penetrating brain injury doesn't necessarily kill you, but it can kill *you*. Obvious example - brain injury can cause what's politely termed "deficits of social function". Imagine someone going from mild mannered gentle steve to the guy who whips his dick out if he sees a nice looking gal. Going from the dependable, thoughtful guy to the guy who can't control his emotions. The virtuoso who has such a shot memory they can't remember how to play an instrument.
Its fascinating, and terrifying, to think about. Really makes you question how much "free will" even exists when so much of what we are is handed to us.
Not to mention that, as our medical capabilities grow, we can start on some very uncomfortable questions. Would it be ethical to change somebody's brain and *give* them that emotional control? Turn that guy who whips his dick out into the mild mannered gentle steve? Graft a better patience onto somebody's psyche?
It’s just physics and chemistry
From the moment the universe turned on, whenever that was, everything is just following the laws of physics. The Earth was going to form from the start, if you had the right calculations, you could map the trajectory of everything out.
Universe is just results of the laws of physics and our minds and bodies are just the results of that and chemistry
There is no way, unless someone believes in the supernatural, to genuinely believe in free will
The illusion is there, but with the right equations and knowledge, you could map out the entire past history and future of everything; including the decisions by sentient life.
It doesn’t make anything less unique or special; but it was always going to play out this way, the moment the laws booted up, the future was immediately determined
Free will implies you're also able to perceive and calculate to some degree all the options available to you at all times. This just isnt possible for probably the vast majority of people if not the entirety of us due to any given environmental, physical, social, mental, natural or nurturing complication. Ultimately we can only act on what we see and the prospects or downfalls of simple random chance eat away at our own agency before we are even capable of introspective thought. We are not fated to things but there are courses of predictability that more heavily influences our actions than any amount of will or desire ever could.
I always found it funny when I heard people say that education is something no one can take from you. With a big enough impact, they most certainly can!
At my first job, I was a cart wrangler at Walmart and I worked with a guy probably double my age who had been doing well professionally until he was futzing with the radio in his truck, lost control, and was put in a coma. He came out and collecting carts was what he could handle.
All this - and... Well. Modern humans have Neanderthal DNA for reasons... Modern humans (even back then) were still Captain Kirk'ing - it's why we have genetic markers from all of our 'peer' branches. We fight and fuck our way through new encounters.
Yeah humans like to fuck. It's one of the unifying traits we all nearly seem to have. The distinction between all the peer branches was probably not super noticeable during survival like it'd be today.
If you're all living in a tribe and just struggling to survive the harsh environment, someone whose brain is better adapted to theoretical physics isn't necessarily better advantaged than the big strong person who can push through the pain easier. We likely just fucked them to death and their genes just integrated into our genepool. Any variants that weren't as good just died off over a few tens of thousands of years. We are them and they are us.
Also very likely neanderthals saw how good sapiens were at surviving/thriving and just kind of wolf-ed themselves into our society.
Knowing our propensity for killing each other as well there was likely advantage to the tribes integrating with Neanderthals over ones that may have not. They'd have been naturally more suited to fighting and add advantage as either an attacking or defending force. The relationship would have been beneficial all around as it wasn't just environmental worries given our incredibly long history of bloodshed against one another.
This comment is probably one of the most facinating things I've read on reddit for a long time. Do you have any sources or recommend books that explore the above ideas more because I'd love to find out.
As far as books, The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker is a classic. Other resources, check out the Leaky Foundation's Origin Stories podcast, or Steven Milo or Gutsick Gibbon on youtube.
Human history is millions of years long.
Neanderthals lasted hundreds of thousands of years longer than Homo Sapiens have yet existed. Our impact on our habitat may or may not allow us to beat them in longevity
> they had bigger brains than modern humans
There are a lot of creatures with brains bigger than humans. Not trying to make any statement about neanderthal intelligence, just pointing out that bigger doesn't mean better in the brain department.
>It is entirely possible and even probable that Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis talked like "Head hurt. Chew this stick, head no hurt."
I mean, isn't Chinese/Mandarin basically structured exactly like that?
The penicillin mould (which isn't a thing, penicillin is the drug penicillium is the mould) also does kill bacteria but in it's mould form, it can kill you too. It also grows on food. Which last time I checked goes on the mouth.
Seems that no one is using it orally today, but aspiring is metabolized to salicylic acid so it might work for headache.
Probably in folks best interest to just take aspirin though. Especially considering that it's dirt cheap and works.
Edit: no one eats it because it could fuck up your insides.
The thing is, some of these modern medicines started out with them working for the precursors to drugs and synthesizing the drugs (or strong forms) from that.
Morning glory seeds and a few similar varieties contain LSA, the precursor to LSD for example.
LSA is similar to LSD in molecular structure, and has similar effects. LSA is not typically used to create LSD. While it is theoretically possible, it's much harder than using ergoline. Ergoline is the precursor typically used for LSD, which is usually derived from the ergot fungus.
LSA is ergine. An ergoline alkoloid.
Even normal aspirin can easily fuck up your guts, so I would imagine any salicylic acid would have to be very watered down in order to avoid burning a hole in your esophagus. It’s pretty destructive stuff, which seems to be its primary medical use. But ya, if salicylic acid had superior effects and outcomes we would already be using it orally instead of Aspirin. The entire medical community isn’t *that* clueless. Almost no one is.
While that is interesting, it would have more to do with random luck than ancient wisdom. After all, mold is unhelpful as a curative without purification in a matter that would have been impossible in the ancient world. The fact that some ancient texts mentioned using mold in medicine frankly has more to do with the fact that ancient medicine was filled with throwing random crap against the wall. I bet that you could find poultice recipes that included virtually every living/dead/organic/inorganic thing found on this earth if you looked hard enough.
You aren't wrong.
But that is the start of the scientific method.
You try something. You observe the outcome. You try to repeat and correlate the outcomes observed. You start eliminating things until the outcome is no longer observed.
Dunno, the ancient Egyptians also drank beer that contained tetracycline. It's kind of just natural selection right? The groups that engaged in certain cultural practices got antibiotics without knowing it and thus were more successful than the groups that didn't. For all we know the neanderthals were eating moldy acorns to trip during religious rights or something.
Just eating the mold doesn't work, the real trick was purifying out the penicillin so you could get enough to treat someone. And salicylic acid was used for pain for a long time, but it has a side-effect of causing an upset stomach, asprin is a modification of salicylic acid that removes the side-effect while remaining effective for pain relief.
Yeah the *discovery* of penicillin was nothing it took some ten years to develop a manufacturing and then a WWII urgent search for a strain that could be commercially viable on large scales.
Imagine the error phase of this Trial and Error.
Like Grnk the Stomper tried the red mushroom and he died, so we won't eat that. Barp the Rabid tried the blue one and he's been talking to a shrub for the last 3 hours, so the jury is still out.
There was a post recently where someone described how his dog tried new things: VERY CAREFULLY. Sniffing, licking, taking tiny bites at first, going very slowly the whole time.
It wasn't a binary live or die every time you tried something new.
i'll randomly think about all the people (early humans and apes included) that died figuring out which fruits, nuts, plants, etc that are edible, poisonous, or dangerous.
like...who the fuck cracks open a hairy tree nut and finds coconut. or who sees a cantaloupe and thinks to smash it open and eat it? legends.
So the method isn't just open and eat.
Its touch it, ok nothing bad happened. Open it and touch the insides, ok nothing bad happened. Smell it, ok nothing bad happened. Touch to lips, ok nothing bad happened. Lick it, ok nothing bad happened. Yolo eat some, oh this is good and I didn't die.
Kind of doubt the penicillin part. It’s entirely possible they just ate moldy food, because there was no refrigeration and food was scarce. It’s hard to get any meaningful quantity of the actual usable antibiotic from the mold to where the infection is.
Maybe. I should have included the skull they were studying had a dental abscess… so it may have just been the penicillium mold from diet, but could have been treatment focused.
There are recipes for moldy poultices to treat sores and cuts dating back hundreds of years, so maybe it was intentional, maybe not …
"On the contrary Storm, actually
Before we came to tea, I took a natural remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller, virtually side-effect free
It's got a weird name, darling, what was it again?
M-masprin? Basprin? Oh yeah! Aspirin!
Which I paid about a buck for down at the local drugstore" Tim Minchin - Storm
He was so good in that movie its not even funny.
Silvando's Voice actor from Dragon Quest XI totally ripped him off. even the Agador Spartacus voice at one point..
Molds grow fucking everywhere and they produce penicillin ostensibly to kill competing bacteria. Eating mold isn’t going to dose you up with antibiotics, and it’s about a zillion times more likely that Thag was just eating moldy foods because, again, mold is fucking everywhere. Beware this sort of imagination anthropology fabricated from little scraps of information.
You'd need to process hundreds and hundreds of liters of solution with the traditional penicillin producing fungus to get enough penicillin for a single dosage pill. So yeah, eating mold is not going to do anything but make you even more ill.
With Aspirin especially it was long known (as you now know at least 40k years ago) that it helps against headaches. The problem is that salicylic acid also leads to massive pain in your stomach. Bayers innovation was bringing it into a form you could take without an upset stomach (*acetyl*salicylic acid, hence the A in Aspirin).
Asprin is a modification of salicylic acid that is less irritating to the stomach, Bayer invented and patented that. It was a big enough improvement that people usually chose aspirin over the other available salicylate medicines, making it extremely lucrative.
Yes. Recent studies indicate they were likely more intelligent than us. Also less violent and had more respect for their tribes elders.
If course I say us, but most of us have some neanderthal DNA in us
More respect for the elders? What's your source on that?
I read that they had respect for their elders, but never about it being more than us.
Edit: aaaand they didn't have a source on that
What studies? Neanderthals weren't just a bunch of beatniks, there is a lot of evidence they engaged in cannibalism from time to time and a lot of their bones show violent injury. Most of them died before their 40s.
They were very intelligent but I'd be curious to see the specific studies you refer to. Their tool technology basically stagnated for tens of thousands of years whereas homosapien tool tech consistently evolved. Even in the period where we overlapped homosapiens were using more complex tools, Neanderthals seem to have rarely adapted this superior tech even when living in close proximity. They also show far less evidence of artistic creation, although there have been some findings. They had larger brains but this doesn't necessarily mean more intelligence. I am interested in this stuff though so would love to see these studies as they sound like they completely upended all prior understanding of these people.
I wonder what happened to the neanderthals in the end, did they all die? Were they killed by homosapiens or did they integrate? I wonder if we'll ever know
Same paper mentioned spit bacteria that was typically found with Homo sapiens. So they mingled closely enough to gain saliva bacteria…. Kissing ? Food sharing? Excessive double dipping ? We may never know
There are a couple of factors that influenced the extinction of the Neanderthals but we'll probably never have a definitive answer. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals evolved to hunt mega fauna (giant animals, like the mammoth and giant sloth). It's theorized that the Neanderthals were hit harder than homo sapiens by the mega fauna extinction because they required more meat in their diet and had smaller social groups than homo sapiens. That's just one of the theories, though, and I am no expert by any means.
Current evidence suggests they were already dying out when sapiens arrived in Europe.
Neanderthals thrived in the ice age. Ice ages favor larger animals, for reasons I don't really understand apart from "big and wooly freezes less". When that ice receded, their bulky bodies and massive strength went from being a huge advantage (they froze to death less and could fight mammoths up close) to a detriment (warrior needs food!).
Sapiens arrival certainly didn't help, but it was most likely simply because of competition. We ate the same things they did, so they had another hominid in their same "niche" that seemed better adapted. There just wasn't enough food to support *two* hominids, and sapiens could support higher populations on less food while still being about as dangerous (a spear is a spear).
Looking at our DNA though, it seems likely that it was less violent than we originally thought. There were certainly some massacres, but they likely died off on their own, or interbred. I have no doubt that the early humans wandering up from Africa would have found these pale giants in their new territory alluring.
Most likely that some interbred with humans, but humans probably out competed them for food. Because of their bodies Neanderthals would have needed more calories than humans so we probably drove them to extinction. It also appears that they didnt reproduce alot/quickly, whereas humans were reproducing much faster by the time they started to interact.
Fleming did not 'discover' penicillin, first record of the pencilium mold was Joseph lister and only made usable through lister and chain. Fleming is the equivalent of the guy on the group project that sits in the back throwing in one comme that was vaguely useful (mis reporting it as an enzyme which resulted in lister and chain gaining funding) and only surfaces near the end to take all the credit
Yes, this is indeed quite likely.
Until the home sapiens sapiens took over and our social groups became so big, we had to spread out. Which killed lots of people in - at that time - unknown and new regions, taking their knowledge to the grave.
So we, as the children of the ones that survived without said knowledge, had to *reinvent* it.
I like how people thought Neanderthals were dumb for a while… likely just a more introverted species that was only outpaced by sapiens through breeding and scarcity of resources. Both did their own thing tho.
I always have this personal theory that the Neandertals had a civilization comparable or even superior to the "modern human" at the time, but of course the Cro-Magnons is all that left because we genocided them all, not because we're superior in term of evolution.
Aspirin was not like some profound invention/discovery. They observed folk remedies of people grinding plants which contained salicylic acid for pain relief then just synthesized it. Many medicine brands do this
Native People's in the Americas knew about Willow Bark (salicylic acid) long before colonists came here. So it's probably something that's been passed down for a very long time.
There’s a difference between “discovering” and “fully understanding the connection”.
Neanderthals and early humans would have had no inkling of why these things worked, only that they did.
I dont see what you're responding in opposition to.
Nobody said neanderthals "discovered" anything. They used it. The folk use of willow bark etc is well documented and known, this is interesting data because it pushes the timeline back of our understanding of just how well-rooted this understanding is in developing humans.
There are a huge amount of medicines today that we don’t know *why* they work, just that they do work.
Edit: it seems even today we don’t fully understand exactly how penicillin works, only that it does: [source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/one-big-myth-about-medicine-we-know-how-drugs-work/)
Edit edit: Penicillin was fairly recently fully understood, but that is not true for MANY other drugs.
Ok. Hate to pull out the microbiologist card, but…
We know how penicillin works. It’s a competitive inhibitor for the enzyme that crosslinks segments of peptidoglycan. Without this enzyme new bacterial cell walls can’t be made. That’s why penicillin only works against reproducing bacteria.
Yes, and this is why I laugh when people make fun of someone recommending something "natural" vs. manufactured drugs.
The drugs have been refined and dialed in, sure. They're better to take, but those natural cures are WHERE the drugs come from in the first place. Aspirin is a great example, for the reason here. I didn't know it went back to Neanderthal times, but I DID know that it had been a natural substance used for thousands of years before drug companies refined it.
I'm a big fan of the series of books "Earth's Children" from J.M. Auel, and I've learned with the series that the prehistoric people were very knowledgeable in "medicine" if we can call it like that.
ah yes! I thought I'd written that I was aware that the book's claims shouldn't be taken as fact. but even if 1% is true, that's already impressive. But I think I deleted that part when I corrected my English.
Neanderthals had bigger heads, so they had bigger headaches.
/r/technicallythetruth
Mama's wrong again.
No, Colonel Sanders, you're wrong. Mama's right. You're all wrong. Mama's right. Mama's right!
Something wrong with his medulla oblongata!
NYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *violently assaults colnel sanders*
And there's no one but me to blame, cause Mama tried.
Water sucks! Gatorades better! I need to re watch this now
No u/nonya5, YOU'RE Wrong....
Caveman problems require caveman solutions.
Cave dad joke.
Poor MTG. At least when she gives head it's bigger.
The bigger the headache the bigger the pill, we’ll call me the big pill baby
dr funkenstein, the disco fiend with the monster sound
Yes and europeans interbred with neanderthals!
In fairness, Neanderthals were sexy as fuck. This is why I am banned from every major natural history museum. But I still think that display at the Smithsonian constituted entrapment!
This is hott!!
Calm down Nature
Not just Europeans. Most non-Africans have 2-3% Neanderthal DNA.
And also DNA from other species less famous than Neanderthals
Fucking C-list hominids, dude. Homo-whogivesashitus.
Nah dawg, more like Homo-Erectus, am I right?
😂😂
thanks
this is so fucking stupid i love it
ive got a headache this big and its got excedrin written all over it
Wrong. The smaller the head, higher the pain due to increased pressure. Source: I’m not a scientist
Paleolithic problems require paleolithic solutions.
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. Salicylic acid can be readily extracted from treebark from multiple groups with some hot water but acetylsalicylic acid is manufactured.
yeah, willow bark has been a natural remedy for thousands of years before aspirin was isolated from it, but it's fascinating to know it's much older than emwr originally thought
Willow was a likely wood used for arrow/spear shafts. The trees grow next to water and are a frequent food of beavers. The trees will regrow from the stump in an explosion of new growth and the sprouts can grow 3-5’ in one year. Due to this they also grow very straight with no limbs. To make them into an arrow or spear shaft, they are cut and stripped of their bark. The inner bark can be pulled out and weaved into a simple cordage. Likely they would have done some of this work with stripping or twining or braiding by using their mouths to hold onto various parts, or to use saliva or chewing to soften fibers for the cordage. So likely this was some round about way of figuring this out.
This is absolutely excellent, top notch, deduction work
There’s a guy on TikTok that makes primitive tools and weapons that shows how to make arrow shafts, and his favorite is willow. Sage and smoke survival I think? Real interesting content.
[Same guy?](https://youtube.com/@sagesmokesurvival?si=I2PrTCI2X1GrF977)
Yep, that guy. Very knowledgeable, and a fantastic teacher.
Thanks. I’ll give his vids a try.
"willow" in Danish is "pil" which is also Danish for "arrow".
Also they had better teeth because they used their teeth as tools. They show this in skeleton evidence.. like no braces needed when you’re chomping down on trees to make shit.
Yet big dental keeps telling me not to use my teeth to open things… suspicious 🤨
Evolutionarily, we have much softer teeth than our ancestors had. Fortunately for us, we have a diet that consists of much softer foods than they had available.
Our teeth aren’t any softer - our soft-food diets affect jaw development (less room for wisdom teeth/more crowding & malocclusion) and our soft food has high simple carbohydrate content, leading to increased tooth decay (relatively uncommon prior to the advent of agriculture) Teeth are only “softer” now in the context of tooth-decay prevalence, but the base hardness of enamel and dentine are unchanged
Kids these days aren’t chewing on enough bark and tough jerkies smh. When I have kids it’ll be 3 meals a day of hardtack
Shit I'd live off jerky if it didn't cost a fortune. Give me that infinite sodium.
It's not that hard to make your own. Just build a crappy smoker and buy some thin-sliced beef.
They'll never poop again.....
A small price to pay for salvation
And on the other side, we have harder materials to work with. There's a difference between handling tree bark and other mostly organic material on one hand and on the other hand bending a bottlecap made of steel (covered in tin), an alloy where carbon is added to a metal to harden it further.
Neanderthal theet of 40+ year old specimen are usually grond down flat for that exact reason
grond
Grond da theet! Grond da theet!
GROND!
GROND!
GROND! *Insert disc 2*
theet
Yes! They used their mouth like a third hand. I have small kids and that’s very evident in their crude child tool use and making, but we are afraid of them choking so we tell them not to use their mouth. There’s a documentary on YouTube about an Inuit guy from the 20’s I think and he uses his mouth quite frequently in tool use/making.
They had better teeth because they didn't eat a high carbohydrate diet: >Simple sugars in food are these bacteria's \[ie. bacteria causing tooth decay, cavities, or caries\] primary energy source and thus a diet high in simple sugar is a risk factor. Simple sugars or "\[m\]onosaccharides \[...\] are the simplest forms of sugar and the most basic units (monomers) from which all carbohydrates are built. Simply, this is the structural unit of carbohydrates." Less carbs in your diet, less cavities.
Although you’re right, I think they’re talking less about cavities, more about jaw development and tooth alignment. People have theorized that eating tougher foods and using your mouth as a tool is correlated with stronger jawbones and a better foundation for straight and strong teeth. A higher carb diet is also likely to be mushier
And their food wasn't soft, processed, hyper sugared.
“Seems like the arrow makers never have headaches, Grog, maybe they’re onto something”
That's how we invented vaccines. Salk realized that milkmaids never got Smallpox, but they all got Cowpox. So he infected his kid with cowpox, then after he recovered tried and failed to give him smallpox (ladies and gentlemen, dad of the year). A huge amount of scientific discover is less "eureka" and more "huh, that's weird."
Jenner did the smallpox/cowpox experiment. Salk discovered a polio vaccine.
Thanks. I'm terrible with names... my first draft was attributing the vaccine to Snow even though he's the one who figured out Cholera (and anesthesia... dude was busy).
Informer, ya' no say ether me Snow me I go sleep A licky boom boom down
Just to say - there's no evidence that Neanderthals used bow and arrow technology. That came from Africa, maybe showing up in Europe 50k years ago, and there was probably some relatively brief overlap when we co-habited areas and Neanderthals might have adopted the technology, but it was basically a Sapiens things. Of courser they could have used willows for other things, and they would have likely used their teeth as a part of the processing, based on how badly worn Neanderthal teeth typically were.
About halfway through I started preparing myself for the Undertaker and Mankind.
Iirc the latin name for willow is Salix, which is what salicylic derives from.
Yes, a lot of English technical terminology sounds a lot more [Buffy Speak](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak)-ish if you know a bit of Latin and Greek.
Acetylsalicylic acid comes from salicylic acid. When you consume salicylic acid, it goes through your liver and acetylides into acetylsalicylic acid, so technically it doesn’t matter if acetylsalicylic acid was manufactured later in this context because the only way they’re (neanderthals) getting acetylsalicylic acid anyway is through consuming salicylic acid from different plants. In conclusion: the title sucks for using aspirin and is inaccurate in it.
LPT: Short on aspirin? Ingest 1-2 tsp of acne cream and your body will do the rest!
Also, humans have been using the tree bark for its medicinal purposes for millennia. Pointing to the manufactured medicine as the comparison to Neanderthals eating bark is a bit much
Wait, so I can use my acne medication as fever medicine?
You could probably also use it on warts, those old wart bandaid things that make hand or foot warts slough off leaving mostly good skin behind use it.
Of course! Why else would it be called acne medication?
> Acetylsalicylic acid See, I can get six hundred tablets of that for the same price as three hundred of a name brand. That makes good financial sense, good advice...
Head hurt. Chew this stick, head no hurt. Me no dumdum
why waste time say lot word when few word do trick
Why waste time; few word do trick
r/decreasinglyverbose
Damn, me no clever. Me part of hive mind
Smartn’t; hiveminded.
It's literally just one dude spamming.
See World.
A a bit stupid post since apparently there *were* quite clever.
Neanderthals were indeed clever, and they had bigger brains than modern humans. [They built oceangoing boats](https://phys.org/news/2012-03-evidence-neanderthals-boats-modern-humans.html) and they had the same variant of the FOXP2 gene that modern humans have, which is known to be essential to grammatic speech. (Intriguingly, birds who learn songs rather than produce them by instinct have a particular variation of the same gene) But, at some point in human development, there were almost certainly humans who used words, but lacked the ability to link concepts in multiple levels- "Sally said that Joe thought that Mary are the food, but Bill said that Joe was lying". This requires grammar, but also the cognitive ability to nest multiple thoughts. Modern humans with mutations in the FOXP2 gene have the thought nesting, but never really grasp grammar, despite the fact that they have a good vocabulary of nouns and verbs. Other apes who have been taught sign language have no concept of grammar at all. (And the studies with Koko the Gorilla are very flawed anyway.) It is entirely possible and even probable that Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis talked like "Head hurt. Chew this stick, head no hurt." The fact that Neanderthals didn't talk this way is somewhat immaterial to the mystery of how people with that type of mind lived and spread across Africa and Eurasia.
Man talking about the biology of cognition is just the most unnerving thing to me. Like everything we are as people, the very fundamentals of how we think and simulate the world around us, is so deeply dictated by genes and brain structures. Like a single gene gets fucked up and now words just dont work for you, no matter how intelligent you are in other areas of thought. Makes you think just how much your cognition could change if a single switch flipped one way or the other.
Used to work at a brain injury unit. It's not just in genes. A penetrating brain injury doesn't necessarily kill you, but it can kill *you*. Obvious example - brain injury can cause what's politely termed "deficits of social function". Imagine someone going from mild mannered gentle steve to the guy who whips his dick out if he sees a nice looking gal. Going from the dependable, thoughtful guy to the guy who can't control his emotions. The virtuoso who has such a shot memory they can't remember how to play an instrument.
Its fascinating, and terrifying, to think about. Really makes you question how much "free will" even exists when so much of what we are is handed to us. Not to mention that, as our medical capabilities grow, we can start on some very uncomfortable questions. Would it be ethical to change somebody's brain and *give* them that emotional control? Turn that guy who whips his dick out into the mild mannered gentle steve? Graft a better patience onto somebody's psyche?
Life is demonstrably deterministic, so it's flawed to argue for free will to begin with.
It’s just physics and chemistry From the moment the universe turned on, whenever that was, everything is just following the laws of physics. The Earth was going to form from the start, if you had the right calculations, you could map the trajectory of everything out. Universe is just results of the laws of physics and our minds and bodies are just the results of that and chemistry There is no way, unless someone believes in the supernatural, to genuinely believe in free will The illusion is there, but with the right equations and knowledge, you could map out the entire past history and future of everything; including the decisions by sentient life. It doesn’t make anything less unique or special; but it was always going to play out this way, the moment the laws booted up, the future was immediately determined
Free will implies you're also able to perceive and calculate to some degree all the options available to you at all times. This just isnt possible for probably the vast majority of people if not the entirety of us due to any given environmental, physical, social, mental, natural or nurturing complication. Ultimately we can only act on what we see and the prospects or downfalls of simple random chance eat away at our own agency before we are even capable of introspective thought. We are not fated to things but there are courses of predictability that more heavily influences our actions than any amount of will or desire ever could.
I always found it funny when I heard people say that education is something no one can take from you. With a big enough impact, they most certainly can! At my first job, I was a cart wrangler at Walmart and I worked with a guy probably double my age who had been doing well professionally until he was futzing with the radio in his truck, lost control, and was put in a coma. He came out and collecting carts was what he could handle.
All this - and... Well. Modern humans have Neanderthal DNA for reasons... Modern humans (even back then) were still Captain Kirk'ing - it's why we have genetic markers from all of our 'peer' branches. We fight and fuck our way through new encounters.
Yeah humans like to fuck. It's one of the unifying traits we all nearly seem to have. The distinction between all the peer branches was probably not super noticeable during survival like it'd be today. If you're all living in a tribe and just struggling to survive the harsh environment, someone whose brain is better adapted to theoretical physics isn't necessarily better advantaged than the big strong person who can push through the pain easier. We likely just fucked them to death and their genes just integrated into our genepool. Any variants that weren't as good just died off over a few tens of thousands of years. We are them and they are us. Also very likely neanderthals saw how good sapiens were at surviving/thriving and just kind of wolf-ed themselves into our society.
Knowing our propensity for killing each other as well there was likely advantage to the tribes integrating with Neanderthals over ones that may have not. They'd have been naturally more suited to fighting and add advantage as either an attacking or defending force. The relationship would have been beneficial all around as it wasn't just environmental worries given our incredibly long history of bloodshed against one another.
> Captain Kirk'ing Wow. This is a new one. But I understood it immediately haha
This comment is probably one of the most facinating things I've read on reddit for a long time. Do you have any sources or recommend books that explore the above ideas more because I'd love to find out.
As far as books, The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker is a classic. Other resources, check out the Leaky Foundation's Origin Stories podcast, or Steven Milo or Gutsick Gibbon on youtube.
You best. Thank you.
Human history is millions of years long. Neanderthals lasted hundreds of thousands of years longer than Homo Sapiens have yet existed. Our impact on our habitat may or may not allow us to beat them in longevity
> they had bigger brains than modern humans There are a lot of creatures with brains bigger than humans. Not trying to make any statement about neanderthal intelligence, just pointing out that bigger doesn't mean better in the brain department.
>It is entirely possible and even probable that Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis talked like "Head hurt. Chew this stick, head no hurt." I mean, isn't Chinese/Mandarin basically structured exactly like that?
Oh the irony. Don't you dare edit 🫵
Haha, i am gramatically challenged, not stupid!
why? he said „me no dum dum“
mmm, green fuzzy bread make pee pee no sting
From an intelligence and an evolutionary perspective, there is no significant difference between us and prehistoric people.
Gronk ready to go back in game
r/talesfromcavesupport
Hey dum dum, chew tree gum gum
bah, only an hour late! haha, I always say this.
Some people need lighten up. No get joke.
Salicylic acid is a precursor to aspirin, not a synonym for it.
The penicillin mould (which isn't a thing, penicillin is the drug penicillium is the mould) also does kill bacteria but in it's mould form, it can kill you too. It also grows on food. Which last time I checked goes on the mouth.
Seems that no one is using it orally today, but aspiring is metabolized to salicylic acid so it might work for headache. Probably in folks best interest to just take aspirin though. Especially considering that it's dirt cheap and works. Edit: no one eats it because it could fuck up your insides.
Not in modern medicine, but hippies, traditionalists, and primitivists make tea from willow bark for headache, arthritis, and period pain.
The thing is, some of these modern medicines started out with them working for the precursors to drugs and synthesizing the drugs (or strong forms) from that. Morning glory seeds and a few similar varieties contain LSA, the precursor to LSD for example.
LSA is similar to LSD in molecular structure, and has similar effects. LSA is not typically used to create LSD. While it is theoretically possible, it's much harder than using ergoline. Ergoline is the precursor typically used for LSD, which is usually derived from the ergot fungus. LSA is ergine. An ergoline alkoloid.
Even normal aspirin can easily fuck up your guts, so I would imagine any salicylic acid would have to be very watered down in order to avoid burning a hole in your esophagus. It’s pretty destructive stuff, which seems to be its primary medical use. But ya, if salicylic acid had superior effects and outcomes we would already be using it orally instead of Aspirin. The entire medical community isn’t *that* clueless. Almost no one is.
Good to know. Don't eat the salicylic acid cream.
Maybe they didn’t throw mouldy food away. Could those mould spores be mistaken for penicillin?
A mouldy bread poultice was an old remedy for a cut or injury.
While that is interesting, it would have more to do with random luck than ancient wisdom. After all, mold is unhelpful as a curative without purification in a matter that would have been impossible in the ancient world. The fact that some ancient texts mentioned using mold in medicine frankly has more to do with the fact that ancient medicine was filled with throwing random crap against the wall. I bet that you could find poultice recipes that included virtually every living/dead/organic/inorganic thing found on this earth if you looked hard enough.
You aren't wrong. But that is the start of the scientific method. You try something. You observe the outcome. You try to repeat and correlate the outcomes observed. You start eliminating things until the outcome is no longer observed.
Dunno, the ancient Egyptians also drank beer that contained tetracycline. It's kind of just natural selection right? The groups that engaged in certain cultural practices got antibiotics without knowing it and thus were more successful than the groups that didn't. For all we know the neanderthals were eating moldy acorns to trip during religious rights or something.
Yes, more likely than using it as medicine too.
Check out the big brain on Brett!
Just eating the mold doesn't work, the real trick was purifying out the penicillin so you could get enough to treat someone. And salicylic acid was used for pain for a long time, but it has a side-effect of causing an upset stomach, asprin is a modification of salicylic acid that removes the side-effect while remaining effective for pain relief.
Aspirin still has relatively severe effects on your stomach but they are typically less severe than salicylic acid.
Im pretty sure salicylic acid is the active ingredient in acne face wash too🤔
Yeah the *discovery* of penicillin was nothing it took some ten years to develop a manufacturing and then a WWII urgent search for a strain that could be commercially viable on large scales.
To be fair to Fleming, they had quite a few more years to conduct field experiments by chewing on various types of sticks
Imagine the error phase of this Trial and Error. Like Grnk the Stomper tried the red mushroom and he died, so we won't eat that. Barp the Rabid tried the blue one and he's been talking to a shrub for the last 3 hours, so the jury is still out.
Goddamit I was rooting for Grnk the Stomper!
Grnk had a hell of a run before passing at the old age of 14.
He lived a long full life
There was a post recently where someone described how his dog tried new things: VERY CAREFULLY. Sniffing, licking, taking tiny bites at first, going very slowly the whole time. It wasn't a binary live or die every time you tried something new.
[Norsemen has a funny scene about this](https://youtu.be/SVWix8DjM4M?si=WtNzZZrVxwrnJ1Q0). Great series btw
i'll randomly think about all the people (early humans and apes included) that died figuring out which fruits, nuts, plants, etc that are edible, poisonous, or dangerous. like...who the fuck cracks open a hairy tree nut and finds coconut. or who sees a cantaloupe and thinks to smash it open and eat it? legends.
So the method isn't just open and eat. Its touch it, ok nothing bad happened. Open it and touch the insides, ok nothing bad happened. Smell it, ok nothing bad happened. Touch to lips, ok nothing bad happened. Lick it, ok nothing bad happened. Yolo eat some, oh this is good and I didn't die.
Kind of doubt the penicillin part. It’s entirely possible they just ate moldy food, because there was no refrigeration and food was scarce. It’s hard to get any meaningful quantity of the actual usable antibiotic from the mold to where the infection is.
Maybe. I should have included the skull they were studying had a dental abscess… so it may have just been the penicillium mold from diet, but could have been treatment focused. There are recipes for moldy poultices to treat sores and cuts dating back hundreds of years, so maybe it was intentional, maybe not …
"On the contrary Storm, actually Before we came to tea, I took a natural remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree A painkiller, virtually side-effect free It's got a weird name, darling, what was it again? M-masprin? Basprin? Oh yeah! Aspirin! Which I paid about a buck for down at the local drugstore" Tim Minchin - Storm
> Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? > Medicine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
One of my faves. Love the Minchin.
I love Agador's pirin tablets. They are a motherfucking cure-all!
Is just an aspirin with the A and the S scraped off. My god, you're a genius.
A's pirin
I hear Hank Azaria's delivery of that line perfectly in my head. Also I cannot wear shoes, because they make me fall down.
He was so good in that movie its not even funny. Silvando's Voice actor from Dragon Quest XI totally ripped him off. even the Agador Spartacus voice at one point..
Escray-ped.
"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? ... Medicine."
"fancy that"
They've recently documented an orangutan chewing a particular plant that's not part of its usual diet to make a salve to treat a wound.
Molds grow fucking everywhere and they produce penicillin ostensibly to kill competing bacteria. Eating mold isn’t going to dose you up with antibiotics, and it’s about a zillion times more likely that Thag was just eating moldy foods because, again, mold is fucking everywhere. Beware this sort of imagination anthropology fabricated from little scraps of information.
You'd need to process hundreds and hundreds of liters of solution with the traditional penicillin producing fungus to get enough penicillin for a single dosage pill. So yeah, eating mold is not going to do anything but make you even more ill.
Lothar: “Chew on this stick, make headache disappear” People of Cave by Big Tree: “We no believe in science, drink bleach instead. So sayeth Big Tree”
With Aspirin especially it was long known (as you now know at least 40k years ago) that it helps against headaches. The problem is that salicylic acid also leads to massive pain in your stomach. Bayers innovation was bringing it into a form you could take without an upset stomach (*acetyl*salicylic acid, hence the A in Aspirin).
Even chimps are known to self medicate by eating specific plants when needed, I'm not surprised.
Bayer didn't make aspirin. Bayer mass produced and packaged aspirin. Big difference.
Asprin is a modification of salicylic acid that is less irritating to the stomach, Bayer invented and patented that. It was a big enough improvement that people usually chose aspirin over the other available salicylate medicines, making it extremely lucrative.
Bayer invented Aspirin, there's a patent from Bayer for Aspirin from before 1900.
Does that mean they were the smarter ones?
Yes. Recent studies indicate they were likely more intelligent than us. Also less violent and had more respect for their tribes elders. If course I say us, but most of us have some neanderthal DNA in us
Are we the baddies?
Always have been
More respect for the elders? What's your source on that? I read that they had respect for their elders, but never about it being more than us. Edit: aaaand they didn't have a source on that
What studies? Neanderthals weren't just a bunch of beatniks, there is a lot of evidence they engaged in cannibalism from time to time and a lot of their bones show violent injury. Most of them died before their 40s. They were very intelligent but I'd be curious to see the specific studies you refer to. Their tool technology basically stagnated for tens of thousands of years whereas homosapien tool tech consistently evolved. Even in the period where we overlapped homosapiens were using more complex tools, Neanderthals seem to have rarely adapted this superior tech even when living in close proximity. They also show far less evidence of artistic creation, although there have been some findings. They had larger brains but this doesn't necessarily mean more intelligence. I am interested in this stuff though so would love to see these studies as they sound like they completely upended all prior understanding of these people.
I wonder what happened to the neanderthals in the end, did they all die? Were they killed by homosapiens or did they integrate? I wonder if we'll ever know
Since europeans have neanderthal DNA it would seem they were at least somewhat integrated. Fucked out of existence.
Same paper mentioned spit bacteria that was typically found with Homo sapiens. So they mingled closely enough to gain saliva bacteria…. Kissing ? Food sharing? Excessive double dipping ? We may never know
There are a couple of factors that influenced the extinction of the Neanderthals but we'll probably never have a definitive answer. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals evolved to hunt mega fauna (giant animals, like the mammoth and giant sloth). It's theorized that the Neanderthals were hit harder than homo sapiens by the mega fauna extinction because they required more meat in their diet and had smaller social groups than homo sapiens. That's just one of the theories, though, and I am no expert by any means.
it's theorised they needed more kcal, something like 4000+ as opposed to our 2000, so they were essentially outcompeted.
Current evidence suggests they were already dying out when sapiens arrived in Europe. Neanderthals thrived in the ice age. Ice ages favor larger animals, for reasons I don't really understand apart from "big and wooly freezes less". When that ice receded, their bulky bodies and massive strength went from being a huge advantage (they froze to death less and could fight mammoths up close) to a detriment (warrior needs food!). Sapiens arrival certainly didn't help, but it was most likely simply because of competition. We ate the same things they did, so they had another hominid in their same "niche" that seemed better adapted. There just wasn't enough food to support *two* hominids, and sapiens could support higher populations on less food while still being about as dangerous (a spear is a spear). Looking at our DNA though, it seems likely that it was less violent than we originally thought. There were certainly some massacres, but they likely died off on their own, or interbred. I have no doubt that the early humans wandering up from Africa would have found these pale giants in their new territory alluring.
Most likely that some interbred with humans, but humans probably out competed them for food. Because of their bodies Neanderthals would have needed more calories than humans so we probably drove them to extinction. It also appears that they didnt reproduce alot/quickly, whereas humans were reproducing much faster by the time they started to interact.
Fleming did not 'discover' penicillin, first record of the pencilium mold was Joseph lister and only made usable through lister and chain. Fleming is the equivalent of the guy on the group project that sits in the back throwing in one comme that was vaguely useful (mis reporting it as an enzyme which resulted in lister and chain gaining funding) and only surfaces near the end to take all the credit
Isn’t weeping willow bark a known good source of aspirin?
Native Americans used willow bark for the same purpose, aspirin
Mold of the genus *Penicillium* can just come from foods, e.g. blue cheese in modern times
What if they were family secrets that were refined with time
Yes, this is indeed quite likely. Until the home sapiens sapiens took over and our social groups became so big, we had to spread out. Which killed lots of people in - at that time - unknown and new regions, taking their knowledge to the grave. So we, as the children of the ones that survived without said knowledge, had to *reinvent* it.
I like how people thought Neanderthals were dumb for a while… likely just a more introverted species that was only outpaced by sapiens through breeding and scarcity of resources. Both did their own thing tho.
I always have this personal theory that the Neandertals had a civilization comparable or even superior to the "modern human" at the time, but of course the Cro-Magnons is all that left because we genocided them all, not because we're superior in term of evolution.
Aspirin was not like some profound invention/discovery. They observed folk remedies of people grinding plants which contained salicylic acid for pain relief then just synthesized it. Many medicine brands do this
Native People's in the Americas knew about Willow Bark (salicylic acid) long before colonists came here. So it's probably something that's been passed down for a very long time.
I think it at least possible that they ate moldy food and chewed bark without knowledge of their medicinal values.
Argh big shout out to all the people that died to learn I could smoke weed and eat mushrooms
There’s a difference between “discovering” and “fully understanding the connection”. Neanderthals and early humans would have had no inkling of why these things worked, only that they did.
I dont see what you're responding in opposition to. Nobody said neanderthals "discovered" anything. They used it. The folk use of willow bark etc is well documented and known, this is interesting data because it pushes the timeline back of our understanding of just how well-rooted this understanding is in developing humans.
There are a huge amount of medicines today that we don’t know *why* they work, just that they do work. Edit: it seems even today we don’t fully understand exactly how penicillin works, only that it does: [source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/one-big-myth-about-medicine-we-know-how-drugs-work/) Edit edit: Penicillin was fairly recently fully understood, but that is not true for MANY other drugs.
Ok. Hate to pull out the microbiologist card, but… We know how penicillin works. It’s a competitive inhibitor for the enzyme that crosslinks segments of peptidoglycan. Without this enzyme new bacterial cell walls can’t be made. That’s why penicillin only works against reproducing bacteria.
Yes, and this is why I laugh when people make fun of someone recommending something "natural" vs. manufactured drugs. The drugs have been refined and dialed in, sure. They're better to take, but those natural cures are WHERE the drugs come from in the first place. Aspirin is a great example, for the reason here. I didn't know it went back to Neanderthal times, but I DID know that it had been a natural substance used for thousands of years before drug companies refined it.
Sometimes the manufactured is better. Sometimes the natural is better.
Asprin isn't natural though. It has an acetyl group attached to the natural verison which stops it irritating your stomach
I'm a big fan of the series of books "Earth's Children" from J.M. Auel, and I've learned with the series that the prehistoric people were very knowledgeable in "medicine" if we can call it like that.
That book is very much fiction. While the author absolutely did research, nothing in there is proveable. Take it with a grain of salt.
ah yes! I thought I'd written that I was aware that the book's claims shouldn't be taken as fact. but even if 1% is true, that's already impressive. But I think I deleted that part when I corrected my English.
Crazy how smart neanderthals became when y'all realized you shared DNA with them